Associate Professor of Italian Studies; Giovanni and Ruth Elizabeth Cecchetti Chair of Italian Literature; Graduate Advisor
Italian Studies (Affiliate faculty in Film & Media, Critical Theory, the Center for Race and Gender, and Folklore)
Rhiannon Noel Welch works on modern Italian literature, film, and critical theory. Her first book, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy, demonstrates how race and colonialism have long been central to Italian modernity and national culture, rather than a fascist aberration or a contemporary phenomenon resulting from immigration.
Her current book project, Reverberation and the Anticolonial Imagination, proposes reverberation as a conceptual intervention that addresses how aesthetics—etymologically, relating to perception...